EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular)

EA Forum Team
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May 19, 2024 • 4min

“Call for Attorneys for OpenAI Employees and Ex-Employees” by Vilfredo’s Ghost

I am a lawyer. I am not licensed in California, or Delaware, or any of the states that likely govern OpenAI's employment contracts. So take what I am about to say with a grain of salt, as commentary rather than legal advice. But I am begging any California-licensed attorneys reading this to look into it in more detail. California may have idiosyncratic laws that completely destroy my analysis, which is based solely on general principles of contract law and not any research or analysis of state-specific statutes or cases. I also have not seen the actual contracts and am relying on media reports. But. I think the OpenAI anti-whistleblower agreement is completely unenforceable, with two caveats. Common law contract principles generally don't permit surprises, and don't allow new terms unless some mutual promise is made in return for those new terms. A valid contract requires a "meeting of [...] --- First published: May 18th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AJAhePexStoEhAwto/call-for-attorneys-for-openai-employees-and-ex-employees --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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May 18, 2024 • 3min

“Marisa, the Co-Founder of EA Anywhere, Has Passed Away” by carrickflynn

The podcast pays tribute to Marisa, co-founder of EA Anywhere, who dedicated her life to alleviating suffering for others. It reflects on her impressive work ethic, sense of humor, and the importance of seeking help for mental health issues. The chapter highlights her impact on the effective altruism community and the need to prevent suicide contagion.
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May 15, 2024 • 37min

“Presenting nine new charities - a record for the AIM (CE) Incubation Program” by CE, anusha

We are thrilled to introduce nine new charities launched through our February-March 2024 Incubation Program. This is an AIM record with an average of five charities launched per round in the previous years. We are also proud to announce that thanks to very generous donors from the Seed Network Funding Circle, these new organizations have secured over $1 million in funding! This is a significant milestone for AIM as an organization. We are very grateful for the support of our funders, mentors, and, most of all, the talented applicants who decided to pursue entrepreneurial careers in the nonprofit sector. We are committed to ongoing support for these new initiatives through mentorship, operational assistance, free co-working space in London, and access to an ever-expanding entrepreneurial network of funders, advisors, interns, and fellow charity founders. This article provides a brief introduction to our new organizations. You will find more information [...] ---Outline:(02:24) Centre for Aquaculture Progress(06:00) Notify Health(09:50) Learning Alliance(15:03) Novah(20:05) Access to Medicines Initiative (AMI)(23:52) FarmKind(28:31) Ark Philanthropy(32:02) Taimaka--- First published: May 14th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tDQm4Z5aQytRE2RKn/presenting-nine-new-charities-a-record-for-the-aim-ce --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
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May 12, 2024 • 4min

“Probably Good launched a new job board!” by Probably Good

We’re excited to share a new addition to our site: an impact-focused job board! We’ve considered launching a job board for some time, so we’re happy to add this feature to the Probably Good site. The job board aims to: Help people find more promising job opportunities, including in cause areas that aren’t as thoroughly covered by other impact-focused boards such as 80,000 Hours and Animal Advocacy Careers. Direct our audience to concrete opportunities that meet a high standard of impact. Reduce friction for people on our site to take the first step towards a career change, by providing opportunities to apply for or just exposing them to new options. As Animal Advocacy Careers have highlighted before, job boards are often the primary gateway to career advice sites, and so we hope the job board will also extend our content's reach and general impact. Why we’re launching a job [...] ---Outline:(00:59) Why we’re launching a job board(02:34) How you can help(03:09) Final Notes--- First published: May 6th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZPB87ayzzwAoxycvN/probably-good-launched-a-new-job-board --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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May 9, 2024 • 7min

“Why I’m doing PauseAI” by Joseph Miller

GPT-5 training is probably starting around now. It seems very unlikely that GPT-5 will cause the end of the world. But it's hard to be sure. I would guess that GPT-5 is more likely to kill me than an asteroid, a supervolcano, a plane crash or a brain tumor. We can predict fairly well what the cross-entropy loss will be, but pretty much nothing else. Maybe we will suddenly discover that the difference between GPT-4 and superhuman level is actually quite small. Maybe GPT-5 will be extremely good at interpretability, such that it can recursively self improve by rewriting its own weights. Hopefully model evaluations can catch catastrophic risks before wide deployment, but again, it's hard to be sure. GPT-5 could plausibly be devious enough so circumvent all of our black-box testing. Or it may be that it's too late as soon as the model has been trained. These [...] ---Outline:(01:10) How do we do better for GPT-6?(02:02) Plan B: Mass protests against AI(03:06) No innovation required(04:36) The discomfort of doing something weird(05:53) Preparing for the moment--- First published: April 30th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/J8sw7o5mWbGFaBW4o/why-i-m-doing-pauseai --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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May 7, 2024 • 4min

“Updates on the EA catastrophic risk landscape” by Benjamin_Todd

Around the end of Feb 2024 I attended the Summit on Existential Risk and EAG: Bay Area (GCRs), during which I did 25+ one-on-ones about the needs and gaps in the EA-adjacent catastrophic risk landscape, and how they’ve changed. The meetings were mostly with senior managers or researchers in the field who I think are worth listening to (unfortunately I can’t share names). Below is how I’d summarise the main themes in what was said. If you have different impressions of the landscape, I’d be keen to hear them. There's been a big increase in the number of people working on AI safety, partly driven by a reallocation of effort (e.g. Rethink Priorities starting an AI policy think tank); and partly driven by new people entering the field after its newfound prominence. Allocation in the landscape seems more efficient than in the past – it's harder to identify [...] --- First published: May 6th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YDjH6ACPZq889tqeJ/updates-on-the-ea-catastrophic-risk-landscape --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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May 6, 2024 • 15min

“My Lament to EA” by kta

I am dealing with repetitive strain injury and don’t foresee being able to really respond to any comments. I’m a little hesitant to post this, but I thought I should be vulnerable. Honestly, I'm relieved that I finally get to share my voice. I know some people may want me to discuss this privately – but that might not be helpful to me, as I know some issues have been tried to be silenced by the very people who were meant to help. And to be honest, the fear of criticizing EA is something I have disliked about EA – I’ve been behind the scenes enough to know that despite being well-intentioned, criticizing EA (especially openly) can privately get you excluded from opportunities and circles, often even silently. This is an internal battle I’ve had with EA for a while (years). Still, I thought by sharing my experiences I [...] ---Outline:(00:55) Appreciation and disillusionment(03:30) Specific challenges(03:33) When it has been uncomfortable for diversity and inclusion(04:33) When it primarily became about prestige or funding(07:13) When professional social dynamics were unhealthy(09:46) When empathy is deprioritized and logic/consequentialism/utilitarianism becomes toxic(13:38) Parting ways--- First published: May 3rd, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3GjstAyhH9cDeNar4/my-lament-to-ea --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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May 1, 2024 • 1h 8min

“Émile P. Torres’s history of dishonesty and harassment” by anonymous-for-obvious-reasons

This is a cross-post and you can see the original here, written in 2022. I am not the original author, but I thought it was good for more EAs to know about this. I am posting anonymously for obvious reasons, but I am a longstanding EA who is concerned about Torres's effects on our community. An incomplete summary Introduction. This post compiles evidence that Émile P. Torres, a philosophy student at Leibniz Universität Hannover in Germany, has a long pattern of concerning behavior, which includes gross distortion and falsification, persistent harassment, and the creation of fake identities. Note: Since Torres has recently claimed that they have been the target of threats from anonymous accounts, I would like to state that I condemn any threatening behavior in the strongest terms possible, and that I have never contacted Torres or posted anything about Torres other than in this Substack [...] ---Outline:(00:25) An incomplete summary(01:16) Stalking and harassment(01:20) Peter Boghossian(11:48) Helen Pluckrose(19:02) Demonstrable falsehoods and gross distortions(19:07) “Forcible” removal(24:04) “Researcher at CSER”(27:30) Giving What We Can(31:20) Brief Digression on Effective Altruism(33:53) More falsehoods and distortions(33:57) Hilary Greaves(38:25) Andreas Mogensen(41:16) Nick Beckstead(45:29) Tyler Cowen(48:50) Olle Häggström(56:44) Sockpuppetry(57:01) “Alex Williams”(01:03:57) Conclusion--- First published: May 1st, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yAHcPNZzx35i25xML/emile-p-torres-s-history-of-dishonesty-and-harassment --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Apr 29, 2024 • 4min

“Joining the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace” by Holden Karnofsky

Effective today, I’ve left Open Philanthropy and joined the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace[1] as a Visiting Scholar. At Carnegie, I will analyze and write about topics relevant to AI risk reduction. In the short term, I will focus on (a) what AI capabilities might increase the risk of a global catastrophe; (b) how we can catch early warning signs of these capabilities; and (c) what protective measures (for example, strong information security) are important for safely handling such capabilities. This is a continuation of the work I’ve been doing over the last ~year. I want to be explicit about why I’m leaving Open Philanthropy. It's because my work no longer involves significant involvement in grantmaking, and given that I’ve overseen grantmaking historically, it's a significant problem for there to be confusion on this point. Philanthropy comes with particular power dynamics that I’d like to move away from, and [...] The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: April 29th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7gzgwgwefwBku2cnL/joining-the-carnegie-endowment-for-international-peace --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Apr 26, 2024 • 13min

“Priors and Prejudice” by MathiasKB

Discussing the hypothetical Effective Samaritans movement influenced by socialist ideas, questioning the randomista charity approach vs societal transformation, tracing Scandinavian social models back to labor unions, exploring debates on labor unions, social democratic movements, and charter cities for institutional reform, contrasting perspectives on logical inferences in competitive gaming, reflecting on personal biases in assessing gaming factions, navigating differing beliefs in Effective Altruism through experimental collaboration

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